Patricia Asuncion’s most recent poem to appear here was “Extant” (August 2018).
Gray-Haired Children
By Patricia Asuncion
Wide-eyed, brutal interruption,
no chance for measured protection.
Bullets stop saplings dead
before season.
Every day, 46 children shot
grow old on branches without
voice, forgotten by next breaking news.
Juvenile blooms—
every day 7,
every year 1300,
drop lifeless
to disinterested dirt.
Every year, another 6000
suffer gunshot wounds,
never flower,
most without media mention.
Only mass shootings propagate
mass public interest.
Headlines herald hundreds more
buds burned by guns
since Parkland’s massacre.
Our aged young
brace for the next bullet.
Wow! This is very powerful. I’m almost at the point where I don’t want to see the news.
Patsy…what a powerful and depressing message. Unfortunately, we’re not living in President Obama’s world anymore.
Did you share your poem with the Parkland students?
Such an exquisite writing. Some truths sear our psyches, etch painfilled pleas from within our souls, yet the atrocities continue.